Welcome to today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread.

Our Reading titled Planted in God was written by Patricia Rabin.

The wind is tossing the lilacs.

With that opening line of her springtime poem, May, poet Sarah Teesdale captured a vision

of lilac bushes waving in gusty breezes.

Batisdale was lamenting a lost love, and her poem soon turned sorrowful.

Our backyard lilacs also encountered a challenge.

After having their most lush and beautiful season,

they faced the acts of a hard-working lawnman who trimmed every bush chopping them to stubs.

I cried. Then, three years later, after barren branches,

a bout of powdery mildew, and my faithless plan to dig them up, our long-suffering lilacs

rebounded. They just needed time, and I simply needed to wait for what I

couldn't see. The Bible tells of many people who waited by faith despite adversity. Noah waited for

delayed rain. Caleb waited 40 years to live in the promised land. Rebecca waited 20 years to conceive a child.

Jacob waited seven years to marry Rachel. Simeon waited and waited to see the baby Jesus.

Their patience was rewarded. In contrast, those who look to humans will be like a

bush in the wastelands, says Jeremiah 17 and 6. Poet Teesdale ended her verse in such gloom.

I go a wintry way, she concluded.

But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, rejoiced Jeremiah.

They will be like a tree planted by the water.

The trusting stay planted in God, the one who walks with us through the joys and

adversities of life.

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